Article Author:
Associated Press
Ed White
A bridge near the vacation home of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Anti-government extremists drive through the night to keep plotting kidnappings.
Tim Bates (known simply as "Red" in the group) picks up after getting out of his truck, and Adam he invites Fox to take a picture of the bridge. said. The government claims that it was part of a plot to capture Whitmer that destroyed it.
There were no kidnappings in Elk Rapids. About a month later he was charged as a domestic terrorist in October 2020, with Fox, Barrycroft Jr., and four others arrested.
Fox and Croft are on trial for his second time on conspiracy charges. An April jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict, but acquitted two other men.
Bates said he could get explosives. He said he sold himself to the group as a person. By the fall of 2020, he said, there was talk of buying bomb parts and the FBI wanted to get a handle on it. Another agent and informant had already infiltrated the group.
Bates said Fox had also spoken about destroying a second bridge in the Elk Rapids area, but the government secretly provided evidence of that in recorded conversations. The agent also admitted during cross-examination that he had not disclosed it during his first trial last spring. The recorder worked, didn't it?" said Fox attorney Christopher Gibbons.
"I can't speak to how they all worked," Bates replied.
The defense alleges that Fox and Croft were entrapped by government operatives who offered their barbaric views. Prosecutors say the group wanted to provoke a national uprising and were particularly furious at the COVID-19 restrictions Whitmer imposed in the early stages of the pandemic. One tried to substantiate the allegations by exhaustively cross-examining government witnesses. Like Gibbons, Croft's attorney, Joshua Blanchard, noted that Fox had no record of him talking about destroying the second bridge.
"Can you hear me?" said Blanchard.
Croft, 46, is from Bear, Delaware. Fox, 39, lived in the basement of a vacuum cleaner store in the Grand Rapids area. He accused him of fomenting anger and refusing to denounce right-wing extremists such as those accused of hate groups and conspiracies.
Trump recently called the kidnapping plot a "bogus deal."
—— Find full coverage of the
AP kidnapping plot trial: https://apnews.com/hub/whitmer-kidnap-plot-trial
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